I would like Jose Mourinho to stop talking

Jose Mourinho has left chilly England for the sunshine of Dubai, taking his Manchester United squad and surly countenance with him. He will doubtless be hoping that a break will do his team good, and his team will likewise be hoping that a bit of sunshine and some duty-free shopping will turn its manager’s frown upside down. For everybody else, there’s the prospect of a week or more free from one of this season’s most reliable and reliably vexing news stories: Jose Mourinho Has Said A Thing.

Let’s leave aside for the moment his latest, ongoing spat with Antonio Conte, more on which later. Instead, let’s think about all the Things he’s had to say this season. Things about his players’ childish decisions and about Manchester City’s greater purchasing power. Things like his heavy flirting with PSG or the digs at United fans. Things such as the injuries he should moan about more, or the credit he is never given, or...well, you can pick your favourite.

What separates Mourinho from other managers is not that he uses his media appearances to distract, dissemble, or denounce. Nor that he is often wrong, or at best highly selective, in the details, the implications, and the context of what he says. Nor even that when he is right; he is often wildly hypocritical in the process. All Premier League managers do a bit of that every now and then. Indeed, Mourinho used to only do it now and then and was all the more charming and effective for his restraint.

For it’s a job that comes with obligatory press conferences before games and interviews afterward, and so a few Things are practically unavoidable. If there’s somebody out there who could negotiate every single one of those without saying a single Thing — why are your good players leaving? why did you lose? why are you rubbish? when are you getting fired? — then they’re wasting their life in football and should be seconded to the UN immediately.

But no manager says Things the way Mourinho, here in this long post-Madrid moment, says Things. His commitment is, perhaps, almost admirable. Maybe he has a tiny community of admirers out there somewhere with no interest in football, who simply enjoy the sight of a craftsman dancing on the heights of his chosen art — who greet every snap and snarl and sulk with a nod of approval, a quiet coo of admiration, a “Did you hear that? Brilliant.” What a season they must be having.

The rest of us...not so much. For Mourinho’s Things are relentless and aggressively gratuitous. They come after victories and defeats, good performances and bad, before games and after them and any other time he happens to feel like it. Which means that these Things, at heart, always seem to be said in remorselessly bad faith. It’s not that he knows he is lying or that he think he’s telling the truth; it’s that he doesn’t seem to really care. What matters is the saying of the Thing and how it ruins everybody else’s day.

Because the trick is that Mourinho isn’t just, himself, boring, but he makes you boring too. His dull pokes provoke dull responses, whether in agreement or otherwise. “Actually, Jose, I think you’ll find that you’ve spent just as much money …” “Look, Jose has a point here, City’s investment over the last four windows …” “If you look at the schedule, Jose, you’ll see that …” Boring, boring, boring. Even the most effervescent and entertaining of voices is dragged down into a claggy gray pit of miserable pedantry. You feel bad and tired for having engaged with him, and even if you’ve shown him to be wrong, he doesn’t care. Or notice. Or stop.

Such weaponised bad faith crops up in every sphere of modern life, and its effects outside football are often considerably more malign. But it is dispiriting in football precisely because, well, it saps the spirit. There is supposed to be fun in football, somewhere, however deeply buried under the surrounding nonsense. This time spent thinking, reading, and writing about it is supposed to be a constituent part of something enjoyable.

And here comes Jose Mourinho, manager of Manchester United, and he doesn’t even seem to care as he curls his lip and says: Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Why are you hitting yourself? It’s amazing how much money Pep Guardiola has spent. You’re hitting yourself again.

So to this latest row with Antonio Conte. At first it seemed just like any other tedious Mourinho bit: He’d say that he wasn’t a clown on the touchline; everybody would splutter “But, but, but, the Nou Camp! The kneeslide! The coat!”; and everybody would die a little in the process. Then the next time he spoke to the press he’d have something else weird lined up. But blessedly, beautifully, some genius in the press pack decided that of all the possible touchline clowns in the league — and there are many — Mourinho meant Conte specifically. Then they asked the Italian about it. And lo! A proper row was born.

And it’s a little different and a little better. Admittedly, much of this difference is because the sight of two grown men flinging their dignity to the ground and jumping all over it is, in its own right, very funny.

But further, it is an argument that requires nothing from the rest of us. Only the most trenchantly committed observers have to pick a side and start arguing over whether Mourinho meant Conte in the first place, whether Conte meant “amnesia” when he said “demenza senile,” whether historical match-fixing is worse than contemporary hypocrisy, and so on.

Since not even Mourinho can say all the Things at once, the rest of us can take a moment — a metaphorical jaunt to the sunshine. If he’s going to spend the next few weeks making jokes about Conte’s hair, the rest of us get a break from pulling ours out in frustration. So ... thanks, Jose. Thanks, Antonio. Keep up the deeply embarrassing work.